How Data Is Critical For Content Marketing Success

How Data Is Critical For Content Marketing Success

From blog posts and videos to social media posts and infographics, there is a lot of content out there. But is it all engaging? The secret of great content lies in value creation.

Today, marketers are creating content for a new breed of customers—people who have the technology at their disposal to block content that’s not relevant to their needs. Content, therefore, can’t push to sell anymore; it has to inspire, inform and engage your audience. To do that, marketers have to put data at the heart of their content marketing to maximize their efforts.

But how do you uncover the best insights without getting overwhelmed by the data deluge?

We take a closer look at the types of data sources you can use to enhance your content marketing.

Analyze competitor content
Monitor content that’s already out there on the web: What type of content has the most engagement? What types of content are your competitors publishing? Which content categories are your competitors focusing on? Which content formats do they use the most? By understanding what type of content your competitors are creating—and how your content marketing strategy measures up—you will be able to identify topics and categories to focus on, and even come up with innovative content ideas.

Social media channels

Tracking social media content performance is crucial for making decisions about your content—from what topic to choose to the content format you’re sharing. For example, you can utilize Twitter Analytics and Facebook Insights to track best performing posts, impressions, reach, the time of day you’re choosing to publish social media posts, etc. All of these metrics help you figure out which piece of content is doing well among your target audience. Again, the rich insights you gather from this activity enables you to come up with new topics and ideas. You need to constantly experiment with your social media content to know what’s working and what’s not.

Email newsletters
If your company produces email newsletters, you should be tracking the performance of those as well. Because the success of your email newsletter depends on how many people actually click to open it. You don’t want to spend time and resources on marketing efforts that aren’t generating the results you desire. Keep an eye on the following metrics to make sure you have the right insights to guide your content marketing decisions:

Click-throughs: You want your customers to click on your newsletter and open it, right? Tracking click-throughs can help you craft your newsletter strategy and tweak the content you’re creating.

Conversions: After clicking on your email, what do people do? Are they clicking through to a landing page on your website and taking some action? Are they clicking on the CTA (call to action) button placed on your website? The data gathered from tracking these metrics can inform your content marketing strategy.

Open rates: What’s the average open rate for an email marketing campaign like yours? How much should the bounce rate be? It’s important to know the percentage of people who are opening your email newsletters. Having this data can help you craft better, more engaging headlines and newsletter content.

Website content
Take the time to analyze your own website’s content; think about the blog posts, blog titles, publication times, and days of the week that you’re choosing to post content, etc.

How to leverage data to enhance your content marketing

The wealth of data that you’ve now gathered can be used to refine your content marketing efforts. Analyzing the data tells you which component of your strategy is working, and which is not. For example, your analysis might tell you that you need to post content on your social channels more frequently or change the publication timings of your blog posts. Regardless, decoding this data over time tells you which pieces of content are driving maximum engagement with your audience and which ones aren’t working.